Who Did This?

Paul Davis (Philadelphia, PA)

After shuttling back and forth between commercial, academic and
research programming jobs (EMBL, Schlumberger, Rabbit Software,
ScenicSoft, University of Washington CS&E) for 12 years, being
the 2nd employee at Amazon.com (and then quitting) gave me the
chance to finally start writing the kind of software I wanted to
write in the way I wanted to write it.

I have now spent about 16 years developing audio software
for Linux and OS X. In the winter of 2008-2009, I was
honored to be the Edgar Varese Guest Professor at the Technical
University, Berlin.

Although Paul was and is the primary author of Ardour, many other
people have contributed to it.

Active Developers

These people have all made code contributions to Ardour within
the last 12 months, as well as substantive contributions over the
life of the program.

David Robillard (Ottawa, ON)

David is the brains and the fingers behind Ardour's
support for MIDI recording, playback and editing. Before,
during and after the two Google Summer of Code sponsorships
(but mostly before & after), David also ended up making
substantial (and great, and deep) design changes to the
codebase that is now Ardour 3.X. When he's not keeping fellow
Ardour developers company with his curmudgeonly wit on IRC,
David is also responsible
for Ingen, Patchage
and other pieces of linux audio infrastructure such
as LV2. Rumor
has it that he also is working on some kind of post-graduate
degree.

Robin Gareus (France, Germany)

Robin set out to make
Ardour even more suitable for professional A/V post-production.
He single-handedly implemented the video-timeline, reworked
the metering and various aspects of the internal signal-routing.
He is also responsible for huge improvements to Ardour's
ability to sync with MIDI timecode and LTC, the meterbridge
and a list of other accomplishments far too long to mention. For the last
couple of years he has been one of the most prolific and
productive developers working on the project, making huge
contributions to both the code and our build tools.

Nick Mainsbridge (Australia)

Nick is responsible for many improvements to the
rulers. With financial support from SAE, Nick also made a huge
push to get the GUI performance of the native OS X port up to
acceptable levels. In later years, Nick has made
contributions in many different places, most recently a
notable speedup in waveform rendering.

Colin Fletcher (United Kingdom)

Colin is a jack of all trades and master of some
... despite having no particular area that he was personally
responsible for, he continues to tweak, cajole and
occasionally brute force improvements and new functionality
from many different aspects of the code. He was particularly
responsible for integration with Freesound.

Ben Loftis (Nashville, TN)

Ben is a software developer and director at Harrison
Consoles; He's the project manager for Harrison's Mixbus DAW
and a regular open-source contributor to Ardour. Ben's
focus is the user interface, and he's been the primary or
sole developer of commercial audio interfaces for products
spanning from $39 to $1M which are in use at NASA, Fort
Knox, Sony Pictures, and thousands of bedroom studios.

Tim Mayberry (Brisbane, Australia)

Tim did lots and lots and lots of work on mouse-driven
editing. As part of Google's Summer of Code program, he did
the initial work of porting Ardour to Windows. Despite several
hiatuses from Ardour development, he has been back at work
recently, bringing cleaner and more C++ idiomatic code to the
program and developing and improving our Windows audio+MIDI
I/O handling.

Alumni

These people are no longer active in Ardour's development but
made significant contributions over the life of the program.

Jesse Chappell (Washington, DC)

Jesse is probably Ardour's god-parent, and made many, many
major contributions to Ardour. Jesse was responsible for
Ardour being able to handle multichannel tracks, a major
change in the program's design and capabilities. He also made
many additions/improvements to the GTK GUI, including mouse
zoom mode and the route params editor. He was the first person
to just "walk in" and understand the Ardour codebase, and was
also responsible for Paul spending way too much time on
IRC. Meanwhile, he also wrote the amazing live looping
tool SooperLooper
and the incredible frequency-based effects
unit FreqTweak. He
is also responsible
for ThumbJam, an awesome
iOS application.

Taybin Rutkin (New York, NY)

Taybin has been involved with Ardour for a long
long time. He has contributed lots of code, and was
particularly responsible for the use of XML in the state persistence
aspect of the program. He also (re)wrote the soundfile library code to
use LRDF. In addition he was responsible for the integration of the
gettext system and the compose() templates that make Ardour's
internationalization possible. He has consistently made suggestions
that resulted in significantly more elegant code and design. Taybin
also set up and oversees our Drupal CMS and Mantis bug reporting system. Taybin initiated the port to OS X, and started
work on the native OS X version. Then he got a more
demanding job, and then a girlfriend and then a fiance and
then a wife and then a child and then ...

Marcus Andersson (Karlstad, Sweden)

Marcus contributed a number of useful
patches and worked on the dB-related issues in the gain stages and
metering, other numeric computations, and much useful debugging, bug
reporting and analysis.

Jeremy Hall (Sterling, VA)

Jeremy contributed several patches and worked
intensively on ksi_ardour, a (sadly historical) keystroke-based-interface to libardour
designed for sight-impaired and GUI-averse users.

Steve Harris (Southampton, UK)

Steve contributed code to handle speed-based
interpolation, an area I did not want to get my head around, as well
as dithering, panning, metering and other DSP-centric issues. He also
wrote the LRDF library used by Ardour's soundfile library code, not to
mention dozens of LADSPA plugins that
make Ardour a truly useful tool.

Colin Law (the Center for Music Technology, Glasgow, Scotland)

Colin wrote the code
that supports Ardour's integration with the CMT Animatics engine. He
was also very involved in refactoring the GUI code design to support
different kinds of tracks.

Gerard van Dongen (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

Gerard did a set of scattered
but critical work with a vague focus on the mouse, and made some
particularly important fixes to the incredibly hairy code that draws
automation curves. Gerard also helped out with a workshop on Ardour
held at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Rotterdam, in November
2004. Tragically, he died aged 39 on March 4th 2006, survived by his wife and two young children. His spirit lives on not only in his family but also in his music and his contributions to Ardour and other free software.

Sampo Savolainen (Helsinki, Finland)

Sampo became a major contributor of
minor patches as Paul began working full time for a while. He fixed
numerous bugs, some on mantis and some not, fairly continuously for
several months. He then moved on to write SSE assembler routines to
handle the CPU-hungry metering and mixing routines. Somewhere along the way, Sampo wandered off
into building actual hardware and Ardour has never been the same since.

Carl Hetherington (Northern UK)

Carl's work on Ardour is substantive and impressive. During
the latter half of the Ardour3 development cycle, he became an
incredibly productive bug fixer and feature implementor, with
work ranging from the implementation of the new I/O matrix
dialog and several notable pieces of important editing
functionality all the way through to minor GUI prettification
and code cleanups. His contribution to Ardour3 cannot be
underestimated.

Torben Hohn (Germany)

Torben is a coding master who has contributed huge amounts
to many Linux audio projects, including JACK, gAlan, and
Ardour. Along with Paul, he was responsible for the hacking on
FST that made VST support possible. His contributions to Ardour
are too many to list, but among other things he was responsible
for parallelizing DSP execution in Ardour3 as well as a whole
series of patches to Ardour3 soon after the 2nd GSoC effort that
actually got many features working correctly.

Sakari Bergen (Finland)

Sakari, funded by a Google Summer of Code project, was
responsible for the entire redesign and major expansion of
Ardour's export capabilities. Like our other developers he
also lent his expertise to many other small details and bug
fixes along the way.

A full list of Ardour code contributors and translators is available in Ardour's "About" dialog.

MIDI

Implementing support for MIDI recording, playback and editing
was (and remains) a massive task. It was initiated by David
Robillard, at times with financial support from Google's Summer
of Code program. Hans Baier has also provided
substantial assistance and Audun Halland helped with some
details as well as design and implement the "scroomer" along
with Thorsten Wilms.

Graphics

Thorsten Wilms was reponsible for many icons, graphics and GUI
design in Ardour, in particular the Ardour logo.

Financial Contributors

Although Ardour's development (and Paul's life) is collectively
funded by everyone who donates, pays to download the program or
becomes a subscriber, it is important to specifically
recognize (in chronological order):

Frank Carmickle

first financial supporter of Ardour,
instigator of ardour/ksi.

Ron Parker/Mirror Image Studios (Minneapolis, MN)

first user of Ardour in a commercial studio,
financial contributor, major initiator of
MTC and MMC functionality.

Harrison Consoles is a 40-year veteran of the audio industry
with an enormous list of technology and artistic credits
associated with their products. Harrison contributes
significant financial and developer resources to the Ardour
project. They use the Ardour platform in 2 products: Mixbus
(a low-cost mixing application for OS X, Windows and Linux)
and Xdubber (an enterprise-class destructive multitrack
recorder).

Waves used Ardour as the starting point for
their Tracks
Live product, and have also provided generous funding at
various times. The founders of Waves
have always been vocal in their support of Ardour's
goals, several of their engineers provided useful feedback on
Ardour's GUI and workflow and the development of Tracks Live
does feedback some useful improvements into Ardour itself.

Testers, Critics, Debuggers, Designers, Engineers

In addition to those listed above, the following people are
among those who offered financial support, design insights and
ideas, encouragement, feedback, bug reports and much more during
Ardour's development. They generally suffered from
days of frustration, and withstood hundreds of code revisions
without complaint. No thanks or praise is sufficient for their
collective contributions to Ardour. In no particular order:

Joe Hartley

Ryan Gallagher

Rob Holland

Jan Depner

Bryan Koschmann

Patrick Shirkey

Rob Fell

Ant

Chris Ross

Joshua Pritikin

Rohan Drape

Johan De Groote

Bob Ham

Chris Goddard

Havoc Pennington & Owen Taylor

Tom Pincince

Marek Peteraj

DuWayne Holsbeck

Edgar Aichinger

Axel Mueller

Jim Hamilton

I would also like to thank Jim Hamilton of Rittenhouse
Recording, Philadelphia, for the partnership, friendship and
foresight he has shown me during Ardour's ongoing development.

I met Jim playing a jazz drumkit at a fundraiser in 2000 to
celebrate the 30th anniversary of our children's nursery school.
Since then, he has continued to open my eyes to both music
itself, the process of making music, and the life of a working
musician.

Jim is the best and most inventive percussionist I have
ever seen, and one of the best I've ever heard. He has always
believed in the social and philosphical implications of Ardour,
and his support and interest have been vital in Ardour's
development.